Airplanes, cats, guns, war, the more than occasional rant about the kleptocracy of President Spanky and his party of treason, the spinelessness of the Democraps and ramblings about anything else that flits through the somewhat offbeat mind of an armed lesbian pinko as she slides down the Razor Blade of Life.Caveat lector.

Words of Advice:

"Never Feel Sorry For Anyone Who Owns an Airplane."-- Tina Marie

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

"Flying the Airplane is More Important than Radioing Your Plight to a Person on the GroundWho is Incapable of Understanding or Doing Anything About It." -- Unknown

"There seems to be almost no problem that Congress cannot, by diligent efforts and careful legislative drafting, make ten times worse." -- Me

For all the talk about the irresponsibility of the Greeks in borrowing money that they clearly weren't going to repay, nobody seems to be paying much attention to the European banksters who lent money without caring whether or not Greece could repay it. In a business or consumer situation, that ends with the borrower going under and the creditors getting largely stiffed; which is why when you or HexBoltCo wants to borrow money, the lenders look carefully at your assets and cashflow before deciding whether to float a loan.*

The larger lesson for nations is that if you want to retain a degree of control over your own financial affairs, have your own currency. The Eurobanksters likely fear that if Greece exits, that other nations will follow.** With their own currencies restored, those nations become in a better position to tell the dweebs in Brussels to sod off.

As some form of trade zone, the EU may survive. But as to the EU's proponents' dream that the EU would become the United States of Europe, they should put down the opium pipe.
_________________________________________* The banksters' refusal to do that during the `00s is largely responsible for the `08 crash.
** Ultimately, they might as well change the name of the central European currency from "the Euro" to "the Reichsmark"

Monday, June 29, 2015

Here's the thing: If your job is to issue marriage licenses, or any other damn form of license, it's not your place to insert your moral beliefs or feelings into the process. The same objection that the Jeebus Asswipes in Tejas are asserting are identical to those asserted back in the civil rights era. Only the people have changed.

If you can't comply with the law and issue the licenses and/or permits, then quit your damn job and find a job that is more in line with your moral teaching.

Oh, and as to not respecting what the Supreme Court has ruled, well, wouldn't you know that the Christian Bible has something to say about that:

Damnation and the Fires of Hell await you, O Texicans who are contesting the rule of law!* Follow the law or your eternal soul will suffer the consequences!**
_______________________________________________* Not that it didn't before.
** Ah, who am I kidding? The Cafeteria Christians won't be swayed. But feel free to snark on them.

Comcast has been offering its standard customers a "free upgrade" to its X1 service for those who use its standard service.

But you know that Comcast is expert at fucking over its customers, right? This is how they do it: Their standard customers have a Comcast-supplied DVR that is pretty much a ten-year-old piece of shit. They break down frequently and Comcast's remedy is to give people another "refurbished" DVR. But even though they're POSs, when they work, they record up to two shows at a time.

The box that Comcast is giving out as part of its X1 promotion records nothing at all. If you want a box that'll record stuff, then you're going to pay more. So Comcast's "free upgrade", in practical effect, is a lesser amount of service because, ever since the first VCRs went on sale, people have gotten away from appointment television. Comcast wants you to go back to that and if you would rather record and watch later, this "free upgrade" to X1 service will cost you even more.

The CATV companies had best get a clue. They're making it more and more advantageous to people to go with watching their shows over the Internet.

Friday, June 26, 2015

From what I saw at ScotusBlog, 60% of the opinion was written the dissenters. I've read hardly anything of it, but the first few sentences of Scalia's dissent reads like something that could have been written by a pro-slavery judge in the 1840s.

The GOP: Wrong Side of History(tm). Smarter heads in the party are probably eager to put this issue behind them, but don't count on the firebrands to let that happen.

Shit like this will probably end with the sale of drones being controlled by the government. There's also a chance that anyone who flies a drone will be required to have a pilot's certificate.

Some assclowns don't comprehend that with the freedom to do something comes some degree of responsibility. Freedom is never absolute, unless you happen to live by yourself on a remote island. What a person does has an effect on others, which is life in civil society.

But either way, the death toll from both types of asswipes is 75 killed in thirteen years. Which is less than a quarter of the number of people killed by lightning. Compared to the number of people who have been killed in motor vehicle accidents, the number of people killed by terrorists of all stripes is less than a rounding error.

The NSA spies on everyone. It's what they do. Expecting the NSA not to spy on people is like a bear not to shit in the woods and steal picnic baskets. If you're a foreign leader, the NSA is spying on you. And even if you use encryption, the NSA has likely cracked your SIM card.
________________________________________________* Being a shit-magnet is about the only function left to ambassadors since the advent of modern communications technology.

BadTux is spot-on about another point: Until the cops begin to do something about the brutal goons within their ranks, then they all wear the hat of brutality.

If you carry a concealed weapon and you make a mistake and shoot the wrong guy, you're going to prison. A cop who shoots the wrong person gets a nasty letter in his file. Even though the cops get a lot more training in the use of force, their misconduct is held to a far lower standard. Hell, you couldn't get away with shooting a dog on the same flimsy excuses that cops give for shooting people.

I think it'd be better to have taken the jerk's money and then make a dollar-for-dollar donation to the NAACP legal Defense Fund or the Southern Poverty Law Center and say that publicly. But you know they won't, because that would piss off the racist component of the GOP base. Which as John McCain learned the hard way in 2000, is a lot of people.

That is exactly what the Asswipe of Charleston did: A white separatist killed nine black people to further the social objectives of those who believe in white supremacy and segregation of the races.

Terrorism is a tactic used to scare people into moving the way that the terrorists want people to move. The Night Riders of the Klan were terrorists. Those who murdered both the black people who waned to vote and the civil rights workers who came to support them were terrorists. The crowds which lynched people were terrorists. The men who blew up black churches were terrorists. All of those asswipes were not killing people just to kill people (like the Asswipes of Newtown and Aurora), they were killing people in order to terrorize the rest of the targeted population to stay in their places.

In recent times, there have been white asswipes who have gunned down men and women who were perceived to be minorities. The Asswipe of Oak Creek was one of them, as were a lot of other such assclowns. Each of the killers' goals varied slightly, but they were all of the same stripe as the Charleston Asswipe: To terrorize people in minority groups.

What the Asswipe of Charleston did was terrorism. The FBI, by quibbling over this point, is showing its age-old stripes.

The Magna Carta was signed (June 15th in the Julian calendar). Its primary purpose was to end a civil war between the English barons and King John.

An argument can be made that the Magna Carta was pretty much ignored by the English kings until the English Civil War in the seventeenth century. The Magna Carta was resurrected as an argument against the divine right of kings, to show that limitations on the monarch's powers were not a new and radical idea, but part of English legal tradition. Its resurrection was still fresh when the United States was created.

Despite those who would assert that presidential power is unlimited*, that limitation derives from the Magna Carta.

Not too shabby for 800 years.
____________________________________* The two Despicable Richards, for example (Nixon and Cheney).

Without slavery, there would have been no Civil War. Slavery almost scuttled the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Slavery is a deep bloody stain on the soul of this nation, and the fact that a lot of white folk proudly fly the flag of the Rebellion to Preserve Slavery is as shameful as it would be if the descendants of those who fought for the Third Reich began flying that flag to celebrate their forefathers' service.

Friday, June 19, 2015

Why do the saloons always have glass in the windows (some cowboy always gets tossed through one), but the doorway is wide open with only a pissant swinging door that's only there for dramatic effect? The doorway can't be closed off to cut out a cold wind or snowdrifts, even if the movie is set in Montana.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Care to estimate the amount of howling rage that would be going on if Asswipe had been yelling out "aloha snackbar" when he was killing people?

What is it with some white young men that they feel some sort of entitlement to kill large numbers of people? The Newton Asswipe, the Aurora Asswipe, the Tucson Asswipe, the Montreal Asswipe, young while bitter men, all of them.

Colt has managed pretty much to fuck itself into the ground, even without the help of the vulture capitalists. They've hitched their wagon to government sales and ignored the consumer market. Colt doesn't make a civilian handgun design that didn't exist before the Great War. They gave up innovating eons ago. All of the other major gunmakers got into the CCW market, but other than the .380 Mustang, Colt ignored it.

If it wasn't for government sales, Colt would have dried up and blown away in the 1990s. and since they are run by vulture capitalists, who can't think long-term past the length of their dicks, the chances of Colt joining the ranks of modern gunmakers is almost nonexistent. For when it came to innovation when it came to handguns, Colt's just not there.

Monday, June 15, 2015

If you pick up the July issue of Shooting Illustrated (and you should, because Tam has a cover story/review in it), look at the photo of accompanying the article on the last page. Now that's some top-shelf Snark.

Tam's writeup of the Walther CCP is intriguing. I'm in the market for a singe-stack 9mm and this one might fit the bill. I had been looking for a Smith 3913, but they're pretty rare and when I find one online, it's priced similarly to new guns (especially when you add in the various transfer feed {thank you very much, ATF}).

Let's be clear on this, shall we: "Good police work" does not entail putting a guy in cuffs, tossing him into the back of van, without belting him into a seat, and then deliberately tossing his ass around on a "black-dog ride".

Are the cops in South Carolina in an uproar after one of their own gunned a man down by shooting him in the back? This, after all, isn't Mexico, the Ley de Fuga isn't the law in this country (most of the time).

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

There us a little-spoken thing about ballistic get testing: Skin doesn't act like gel. As this presentation describes, skin is equivalent to 4" of gel. So a bullet that does most of its damage in the first six inches won't probably do what you need it to do, unless you happen to hit the liver.

Look at a diagram of the human body-- as an opponent faces you, the things that you need to hit often are towards the rear of the body, where they are somewhat protected by the spine. Hydraulic damage isn't probably going to help much if you shoot someone in the lungs, for obvious reasons.

And what happens, pray tell, if you fire those fancy bullets out of a 1911? A fair number of them have left-hand twist barrels, which will turn those fancy-ass hydro-bullets the wrong way.

Historic Flight Foundation got maybe a year of operation out of that airplane before #3 engine shit the bed. DC-7s were known for engine failures. It's probably the reason why DC-6s are still in service around the world and few DC-7s, if any, still are.

Monday, June 8, 2015

Yes, I think the "grip zone" marking is tackier than Lindsey Graham driving a Farmall. Still, I had no trouble hitting the center of a target at ten yards, which isn't terribly shabby for a subcompact 9mm. It felt nice in my hand. If you get a chance to fire one, you might like it.

Those of you in the 10-round mag cap states might want to look at the larger caliber versions.

On a nice day, with lots of airplanes in the air, you can almost always count on a couple of piltos jabbering away on 122.8 about where they're going or whatnot. It's almost as annoying as the bizet calling in from about 16,000' on its descent to check on the status of a rental car.

So knock that shit off, people.

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It seems that most smartphones come with a mapping app. If you're going to park your car in a huge lot, why not use that app to "drop a pin" where you parked your car? That'll probably get you back within fifty feet of it. And it's not as though the fucking NSA/FBI/DEA don't already know where you are. (And it'll save you $25.)

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Jake was by his feeding station, complaining because there was no dry food. When I gave him some, he just walked away. Because he might want it later and by then, I might be out doing something else.

I suspect that whatever steps Jenner has to go through, that the fact that money isn't an obstacle makes a world of difference between her and 99% of the rest of transsexuals. She's not going to have to worry about starting a new career because transitioning destroyed the old one.*

It didn't seem that way in the 1970s. But there had been a quarter-century gap when Secretariat won in 1973.

I didn't watch any of the current races and I don't know anyone who gives a frak anymore about horse racing. But I do remember Secretariat. If you had seen the Triple Crown races, you'd have thought that all of the other horses in the races had three legs.

As a kid, I remember watching the CBS documentary that they aired in 1964, in which Walter Cronkite and General Eisenhower went back to the significant places of the invasion. But it doesn't seem to be available online.

It's getting into the time of the year when, if you want comfy VFR flying, you'd best plan to be back down by noon. Heat-driven cumulus clouds start popping up and, even if they're not forecast, one or two might get angry and start hurling down lightning.

And it gets hazy. If you're up above the joyriding bugsmashers, you can get into a situation where you are legal VFR and effectively IFR. It's like flying in milk.

This morning was nice and there was hardly any wind. I tracked in on the local VOR and, without any maneuvering, got this result:

Got a little interesting at my home `drome for a minute. I was in the pattern and someone called in for a GPS practice approach on the opposite runway. It wasn't going to be much of an issue, for it appeared that I'd be on the parallel turf runway before the GPS-driver executed a missed. But then some {deleted} taxied out onto the turf runway as I was on short final. Now maybe {deleted} thought I was going to land on the pavement and {deleted's} airplane would be clear. Why {deleted} couldn't have just held on the taxiway was the object of a few seconds of Navy-lingo exposition on my part, but not over the air.

I went around. Which of course meant that there was the matter of the inbound GPS-er. As soon I was established in a climb, I broke to the right. Only to see that the inbound GPSer had realized that the practice approach had gone to shit and was breaking off to the left. See, the airport has one of those deals where it is right-traffic one way and left-traffic the other way, which on the rare circumstance can have airplanes flying right at each other.

It all sorted out. {Deleted} took to the air. GPSer got back into a practice approach, but this time, did the one for the active.

Which brings me back to the title. When I finished, gassed up and secured the airplane, I patted it on the cowling and thanked it for the flight. Just something I like to do.

Thursday, June 4, 2015

"Unifying" the aircraft designation system, which largely meant redesignating Navy and Marine aircraft, as the Air Farce was permitted to keep their old designations, was just another one of the minor crimes against history that was committed by McNamera's Whiz-Kids.

Take a few minutes (18) out of your day and watch this. It is a tally of those who died in the war.

And if you're one of those whose history in school was little more than "America won the war, hooray", prepare to be enlightened as to the butcher's bill that was presented to the other nations, especially the Soviet Union.

If the Soviet Union and Germany had not gone to war, given the sheer amount of combat power that Germany applied to their Eastern Front, it's hard to see how the Western Allies could have prevailed on their own.

I had to stifle a yawn while I read this. That the TSA mostly functions as useless security theater isn't exactly a cutting-edge revelation. They catch mainly stupid people who have forgotten that they had a KelTec in their bag, people who weren't exactly a threat to airline travel to begin with. And mainly, TSA agents just hassle passengers for no goddamned reason, including yawning in line.

We're no safer, now, than when we were when the airlines ran security and they hired wannabee mall cops to conduct the security checks.

I submit, Gentle Reader, that only a fool would believe that the NSA has stopped accumulating phone records that. They have the infrastructure in place to do it and do you really believe that some NSA tech has shrugged and thrown the breaker on that? I wrote as much almost two years ago and I think it still stands.

The various legislators can bloviate and speechify all they want to. Congress can pass or not pass laws. The American Stasi will do what the fuck they want, probably because they think there isn't going to be another Snowden or Manning. Rand Paul is exactly right when he warns that the FISA court will rubber-stamp whatever the NSA wants, for it's what they do. Assuming that the NSA bothers to even ask the FISA court, which they've been known to bypass before.

The only real change, for right now, is that we can pretty much tell the Feebies with their prying "national security letters" (most of which had no relationship to national security) to fuck off and die. But that'll change.

Rule No. 5: Terms of Service: Political appointees of the Obama and Bush Administrations may not read this blog unless they (i) post a comment confessing same and (ii) acknowledge that both men are war criminals. This blog may not be read by members of the Arizona Legislature.

Violation of this term is a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and you're off to share a cell with Chris Christie, asswipe.

Rule No. 6: If I wanted you to write a "guest post", I'd ask you. Don't bother asking me to put one up from you. I won't. Start yer own goddamn blog.You Have Been Warned.